<Five conditions for a successful team>
A good direction for a team has three properties: it has to be 'challenging,' 'clear,' and 'tied to results.' A challenging direction sparks energy and raises people's motivation to take part. A clear direction lets you set a strategy that matches the purpose. A results-tied direction makes people fully use their knowledge and skills and actually perform.
If you have a team where those three — challenging, clear, and results-tied — aren't sharp, sitting down together to define and build them helps maximize the team's effectiveness. Our team is taking it one step at a time, too.
As we saw earlier, hoping that a well-tuned direction will somehow emerge for the team and replacing the manager's legitimate authority over team goals with members' consensus decisions is not desirable... (omitted) ... Leaders who do that often end up providing less structure than the team members actually need to finish their work.
True direction-setting is something a wise leader executes courageously — but also carefully and thoughtfully — when sufficiently prepared, and it's the activity that produces organizationally outstanding results.
Every form keeps developing; it is never truly finished.
People are intrinsically motivated when 1) their work has meaning, 2) they feel responsible for the outcome, and 3) they get reliable knowledge about the results of their effort.
1. Team members must take an active, not a passive, stance toward the environment around them. They need to constantly scan the environment and build or adjust their execution strategy accordingly. (Team strategy, plainly put, is the set of choices members make about how they will carry out the work.)
2. The behavioral boundaries of the team's activity must be clearly defined. A small number of things members must always do and must never do need to be identified.
But these two norms don't operate automatically.
Because people have two tendencies:
1. They react to what's visible.
They don't actively scan the environment for less obvious problems or opportunities — they react to stimuli.
2. People seek harmony. Which pushes them to do things they shouldn't — without thinking — or to do more than they should in order to please teammates or customers.
Deviations from group norms — and the people who make them — contribute to the team in their own meaningful way. 'Deviation' shows the team the limits of acceptable behavior. On top of that, it can provide a course correction on many of the processes the team uses to carry out its work effectively.
That said, deviant behavior is a far cry from what triggers innovation or change. —
< Choi Hyeon-muk, AT teacher >
Observation is: "watching the substance and process of your own recurring mistakes, problems, and habits with a curious mind, without fear."
< David Campbell >
If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere you don't.
< my >
The biggest mistake young people make is perfectionism.
When a chance to be recognized comes up (whether internal or external), to seize it,
they start competing — with themselves or with others — or act in ways that push each other out.
